By GEOFF JOHNSON -DN Staff Writer
Updated: 07/13/2009 09:18:51 AM PDT
Though kept clean and in good working order, the Tehama County Jail is old and understaffed, according to an investigation by the Tehama County Grand Jury.
Every year, the Grand Jury, a group of Tehama County citizens chosen through a combination of screening by Judge Dennis Murray and random selection, is convened to investigate complaints against local government agencies.
Among the jury's recommendations are the filling of vacant staff positions and the need for an additional medical position. But unlike several agencies, no response was required from the jail.
The 227-bed jail must maintain an absolute minimum level of staffing at all times, not only for the safety of the inmates and of the guards, but to meet certain requirements of the state. That includes checking all cells on an hourly basis, said Jail Capt. Ronald Dodd.
The needed minimum staffing varies between 10 correctional officers and a sergeant during the daytime on a court day, to four COs and a sergeant on a Sunday night, all of whom work 12-hour shifts and are encouraged to avoid overtime.
Right now Dodd oversees 29 COs, with three deputies temporarily moved from patrol to make up for three frozen CO positions that earn between $2,500 to $3,100 a month.
With only two full-time nurses, who work four days a week, 10 hours a day, one of those officers may have to drive an inmate to St. Elizabeth Community Hospital if no nurse is present to determine whether an inmate is seriously ill, mildly ill or not ill.
The number of COs is also higher because of the jail's design. An odd mix of old-fashioned steel bars and sleek, modern design, the jail shows the changes prison architecture has undergone in 20 years.
On one side of the complex, cells open into narrow hallways, with each hallway named after the color of the door at the end.
Looking through the window of Orange Tank, only the gray bars that make up the doors and walls of each cell are visible, prisoners concealed by the angle of the doorway, though security cameras have been installed throughout the building.
But just a few doors down, the complex jumps forward to the mid 1990s, where a CO can observe two floors worth of prisoners from a second-story tower built into the complex. Here, a CO has access to security camera footage and a two-way intercom system, allowing the guard to communicate with individual cells without leaving his post.
The department is considering converting its dispatch offices, housed next to the jail right now, into additional cells. At some point the department also hopes to construct a new jail north of the probation department north of Walnut Street.
But this year the county is asking for a 3.5 percent budget cut from all its public safety departments.
And talks involving state funding have only invoked a facility that would use state guards and house state prisoners, Sheriff Clay Parker said.
You're building a state prison, he said. What's the difference?
For now, as Capt. Ron Dodd patrols the halls of what he refers to as a small city, any tensions created by a stretched budget do not appear to have reached prisoners.
On Wednesday, as Dodd stops by a recreation room, prisoners greet him with smiles, jokes and sometimes minor requests.
One asks Dodd to plug a cord that runs beneath the cell door and into an outlet on the other side of the corridor, and he obliges.
Another, in a newer part of the complex that houses a two-floor communal living space with open bunk beds and communal toilets and televisions, approaches Dodd to ask him if the captain will apologize on behalf of the inmate to another inmate.
If you treat people humanely, they will treat you humanely, too, Dodd later remarked.
http://www.redbluffdailynews.com/ci_12825536
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